Connotation Lexicon: A Dash of Sentiment Beneath the Surface Meaning

Song Feng, Jun Seok Kang, Polina Kuznetsova, Yejin Choi

Abstract: Understanding the connotation of words plays an important role in interpreting subtle shades of sentiment beyond denotative or surface meaning of text, as seemingly objective statements often allude nuanced sentiment of the writer, and even purposefully conjure emotion from the readers’ minds. The focus of this paper is drawing nuanced, connotative sentiments from even those words that are objective on the surface, such as “intelligence”, “human”, and “cheesecake”. We propose induction algorithms encoding a diverse set of linguistic insights (semantic prosody, distributional similarity, semantic parallelism of coordination) and prior knowledge drawn from lexical resources, resulting in the first broad-coverage connotation lexicon.